


Avalanche

by Dendritic_Trees



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff and Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-23
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-19 09:31:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9432923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dendritic_Trees/pseuds/Dendritic_Trees
Summary: In 1943 Agent Peggy Carter of the Strategic Scientific Reserve volunteered to be Abraham Erskine's first test subject for Project Rebirth only to be reassigned to training the next batch of cadets.In 1945 Agent Peggy Carter and Captain Steve Rogers went down with the Valkyrie over Greenland and were presumed dead.In 2012 Peggy Carter was found, frozen inside the Valkyrie cockpit. Captain Rogers was not. Two weeks later aliens invaded New York.





	1. Enforced Vacation

**Author's Note:**

> Tags and pairings to be updated. 
> 
> Thanks to Wind_Ryder for help with the title and Sortofapenny for encouragement and beta reading.

Peggy shook herself out of the thought she had been lost in and realized that her kettle had long since turned itself off. She grimaced, and crossed the room to flick it back on. Again.

The saving grace of living in the future with kettles that turned themselves off without whistling was that the future also had insulated travel mugs that she could pour her tea into when she ran out of time to drink it at home. She gulped it, standing on the subway on the way to SHIELD’s New York headquarters as it became progressively more bitter and oversteeped. She’d poured the teabag into the mug along with the tea without thinking.

She was late, but no one had been on time to work in New York since the battle and, temporarily at least, people seemed to have silently agreed to turn a blind eye. The sight of people in the streets picking their way around the rubble like it had always been there was reassuringly like the morning after an air raid during the Blitz. Because comparisons like that were what her life had come to. But you couldn’t choose what was familiar to you, she supposed.

 

Rose waved her over while she was rushing towards Fury’s office.

“Hey Pegs,” Rose said, “how’s the apartment working out for you?”

“It continues to be completely fine, thank you,” said Peggy, “I like to think I’m settling in.”

Rose took a moment to look supremely satisfied, and tapped at her computer, “Director Fury hasn’t asked to see you today, you’re just supposed to check in with medical.”

“I know,” said Peggy, leaning over the desk and grinning, “I don’t suppose you could let me sneak could you? For just a moment?”

“He’s pretty busy,” Rose equivocated.

“Please?” Peggy asked, and batted her eyes a little.

“Fine,” Rose sighed, “you’re going to get me in trouble if you keep doing this you know?”

“Thank you Rose,” Peggy said, and waved over her shoulder as Rose buzzed her in.

“Agent Carter,” Director Fury said, “I didn’t ask to see you.”

“Sir, its been three weeks,” Peggy explained, squaring up in front of Fury’s desk, “I’ve heard nothing, and I wanted an update. There must be something I can do to be useful.”

Apart from a glance over his shoulder when she’d entered, Fury hadn’t turned to face her, but Peggy could see his shoulders rise and fall in a deep sigh. After a moment, when he’d built up enough gravitas, he spun his chair ninety degrees to look at her.

“Agent Carter,” Fury said heavily, “the last time we spoke you said you wanted to continue working as a SHIELD agent, and I told you that you needed to lie low, acclimatize and wait until you’re no longer decorating the front page of every newspaper in the country on a regular basis. So unless you’ve developed alternative career aspirations, get out of my office, check in with medical, and enjoy your vacation.”

“Yes Sir Director Fury,” Peggy said, and left somewhat ungraciously.

The worst bit was that, unlike some previous bosses she could name, Fury was incredibly competent and so she couldn’t deny that he was in the right. And not even Colonel Philips could have made ‘enjoy your vacation’ sound like a threat. She exchanged a grin and a shrug with Rose on the way out, and headed down to the medical level.

 

When she got down to medical Violet was standing in the doorway of the waiting room craning her head back and forth. She caught sight of Peggy and waved.

“Construction?” she asked, as Peggy jogged over.

“Yes… and… I possibly might have had a meeting with Director Fury, that I scheduled for myself,” Peggy admitted.

“How did _that_ go?” Violet asked.

“It was very brief,” said Peggy.

Violet sniggered at her and said, “well, hopefully this will also be brief, come in.”

 

Peggy and Violet both knew the ‘checkups’, were only about her health on paper, and she was sure, actually provided a steady stream of research for someone, and they had them down to a science by now, so they could talk while Violet checked her heart and lungs, her hearing, her vision, drew blood and timed it clotting.

“So,” Peggy asked, “how is the boyfriend? David or, whatever his name was? Still giving you trouble.”

“Oh, Daniel, he is, extremely - single. I decided he wasn’t worth the effort,” Violet admitted

“Excellent, good job.” Peggy said.

Violet snorted, “where is all the Daniel hate coming from. You seemed okay with him last week.”

“Well I can’t just come out and tell you your boyfriend is a lump and not worth your time now can I?” said Peggy.

“No, I suppose not,” Violet admitted, and changed the subject, “how about you, have you been out anywhere fun? At all?”

“Well, I got around to trying Vietnamese. There was a restaurant right down the street the whole time. The sign was behind a scaffold and I’ve been walking straight past it every day for weeks, would you believe?”

“What, by yourself, that’s terrible?”

“I think I can manage a trip to a restaurant without assistance thank you very much,” Peggy huffed.

“You know exactly what I mean don’t give me that,” said Violet, finishing up her notes, “you could come out with me if you want to swing by when I get off work. There’s a movie I want to see.”

“I don’t really need assistance with my social life, thank you,” said Peggy, a bit stiffly, and hopped off the table, “and I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

If she’d been a regular person with regular hearing, she would have been out of earshot when Violet muttered, “that was not what I meant you know it Carter”.

 

And she did know, really. And part of it was that, as much fun as she really was having catching up on seventy years of computing progress, modern movies threw her for a loop and she was embarrassed to admit she could handle her smart phone but not a showing of _Skyfall_. But most of it was that she was just sort of tired of the future and wanted to go home.

 

It has been shock, but once she’d ridden out the first, rough couple of days, the future had been exciting. Everything had been bright, and loud and colourful. And there were computers everywhere, and compared to what they’d had at Bletchley, they looked like bloody magic tricks and would have made Alan Turing weep with joy (and oh God Alan, that had been so horrible to find out). And she’d been able to wear trousers to work and not have to worry about it. And there had been so much food, everywhere, which, after war rationing, had seemed nearly as magical as the computers. And then New York had happened and it had taken her mind off everything else. But now the initial glamor had worn off and she had no distractions left and she just missed… everything.

 

“Excuse me, I just need a moment of your time.”

A woman had leant into Peggy’s line of sight, startling her out of her funk and in total violation of all New York manners. She had bright red hair, brighter pink lipstick and a Hungarian accent.

“I’m really rather busy,” said Peggy, even though she wasn’t.

“Not to worry, I’ll only be a second. Do you live nearby?”

Peggy was so taken aback at being compelled to talk to a total stranger in the street that she just went along with it, “I, um, work nearby.”

“Oh well, its still your neighbourhood. We’re a group of volunteers. The city can’t keep up with the damage from the Incident so we’re helping with the rebuilding. You should join us.”

“I don’t think I’ll have the time,” Peggy mumbled.

“Oh well, here,” the woman handed her a single sheet pamphlet with a phone number visible on it, “you can get your schedule sorted out and then come and ask for Ana, have a nice night now.”

Ana waved and headed off, presumably to accost some more innocent commuters. Peggy glared at at the leaflet and shoved it into her purse. But as she continued on her way to the subway, she noticed that a lot of the ‘construction workers’ did seem to be wearing orange vests over athletic clothes and university sweatshirts instead of work clothes.

 

Mid-morning, outside of rush hour, the subway was merely crowded, instead of packed full, and she wasn’t even juggling a drink this time.

 

Peggy got back to her building, and found her neighbour on the verge of collapsing in the stairwell.

“Colleen,” she said, “here, let me help. Do you need a doctor?”

“I’m - okay,” she said, between bouts of coughing and wheezing, “its just the - construction dust and - I left my - inhaler - upstairs.”

Peggy took the bags Colleen was carrying out of her hand, but Colleen waved her off when she tried to loop an arm around her waist to help her up. She could have easily lifted both the shopping and Colleen and probably another person on top of that, but Colleen didn’t know that, and Peggy wasn’t planning on telling her. So she settled for huffing disapprovingly and following Colleen up the stairs to make sure she actually got into her apartment.

Colleen had apparently been right, because once she’d got into her apartment, and dug her inhaler out of a second purse that was hanging by the door her breathing evened out. Peggy let her take a few real breaths then stepped over, herded her into a kitchen chair and started filling up the kettle.

“Oh, Peggy, stop, you don’t need to do that,” said Colleen.

“And yet I’m doing it anyway,” Peggy replied cheerily. There was a box of tea already sitting out on the counter, sparing her the trouble of going through the cupboards.

Colleen looked flustered when Peggy turned back around to hand her a mug full of tea, “this is so embarrassing, I am so sorry about this.”

“Well, its not that far out of my way,” said Peggy, “although, you have delayed my thrilling evening of watching Youtube videos.”

“Youtube? Really?” Colleen asked, “on a Friday night?”

“Has it fallen out of fashion?” Peggy quipped.

“Well, its what I’m doing,” said Colleen, “but I just figured you’d have, I don’t know, a date or something. I mean, you’re all, um. I mean, I just figured you’d have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, or something more interesting to do than me.”

Peggy wanted to get up and leave. Hearing people just, say that, ‘have you got a girlfriend’, was marvellous, but it kind of made her brain scream that something terrible was going to happen, and she knew, really, that that made her an old lady. But she didn’t look like an old lady, and if she ran away every time someone brought that up, she would look like a bigot, which was a hundred times worse than the brain sirens. She resolutely sipped her tea. She’d lived through the Blitz, she could handle a few sirens going off.

“You’ve discovered my dark secret,” Peggy said, very seriously, “I am actually horribly dull.”

“Don’t say that,” said Colleen, “I’m sure you’ll find someone to go out with, I mean, its not like you need to find someone to marry, its not too hard?”

“Oh, well then, I expect you have a whole parade of people you know who I could go out with,” Peggy said dryly.

“No, I actually am dull,” said Colleen, “and I’m considering just not going out at all and staying indoors until the air clears. Its getting really annoying.”

 

Peggy opened her mouth to apologize for the mess. Remembered that that would not make sense, and let the conversation die instead. She finished her tea and awkwardly excused herself. And then she did exactly what she had said she was going to do, and spent the rest of the night alone in her apartment trying to convince herself she wouldn’t rather be somewhere else.


	2. Tony

If she was going to be stuck on a vacation she didn’t want, Peggy figured she was probably entitled to a lie in. So, of course, the phone rang at seven AM.

“I have something to show you? Are you up? Can you come to the Tower? How soon can you be down here? Have you had breakfast?”

“Well I’m awake now Howard,” Peggy grumbled, before she woke up enough to realize her mistake.

“Awkward,” Tony sing-songed down the phone.

“Um,” said Peggy, “my apologies. Tony. What was it that you wanted to show me?”

“Well I’m not going to tell you, you have to come see,” said Tony, like a five year old.

Peggy hung up.

Over the course of the next twenty minutes, Tony called back no less than four times. The forth time, Peggy gave in and answered the phone.

“What do you want Tony?” she grumbled.

“Come have breakfast. See my thing,” Tony whined.

“Fine,” Peggy groaned, cutting him off before he could follow up with the obvious innuendo, “give me thirty minutes.”

She rolled out of bed and started pulling the pins out of her hair.

 

She made it to the lobby of Stark Tower in thirty minutes almost exactly. A PA of some description in a charcoal grey suit greeted her almost the second she stepped out of the revolving door.

“Agent Carter,” she said, “Ms. Potts and Mr. Stark are waiting for you on the fifty-seventh floor. The elevators are, largely working today, you can take the main elevator bank directly to the fortieth floor, but you’ll have to take either the service elevators or the stairs from there. And they’re not in the same place. I’ll show you the way.”

“Thanks for the warning - ah,” Peggy held out her hand to the nameless woman.

“Rebecca,” she replied.

“Nice to meet you Rebecca,” said Peggy. I hope you weren’t dragged into work on a Saturday just to advise me about the elevators.”

“Oh no. Ms Potts’ assistants all work on a rotating schedule, I just got lucky,” said Rebecca. “I’m about to be shockingly unprofessional and ask for an autograph.”

“Uh,” said Peggy, and stopped dead.

By the time Rebecca had pulled out a photograph and a pen she’d mostly recovered. The photo Rebecca had picked wasn’t the one of her with the shield up she’d seen five million times and never wanted to look at again. Instead she’d found another shot, of Peggy standing sideways to the camera, bracing a half-collapsed doorway so the people inside could escape. She immediately liked Rebecca more just for that and when she signed the photo she grinned and whispered “I won’t tell Ms. Potts, it can be our secret.”

“Thanks,” Rebecca stage-whispered back, with a smile that made her nose wrinkle.

 

There was an unreasonable amount of food waiting for her on the fifty-seventh floor. Tony had somehow contrived to put together a whole buffet while she’d been making herself presentable and travelling a few subway stops, but hadn’t shown up, Ms. Potts was by herself sitting on the couch with a plate of fruit. She wasn’t totally surprised.

Rebecca made to fade into a corner like a good PA but Peggy shoved a plate at her and waved her at the buffet, which was just as excessive for four people as it was for three. She watched Pepper while she did so, only to see that Pepper was already watching her. They looked at each other for just a moment. Pepper warmed from the deliberately neutral expression which seemed to be her default, to a relaxed sort of almost-smile. Peggy could feel her own face relaxing along with her.

Peggy piled her plate up with toast, bacon and scrambled eggs, and then added strawberries and a scone. She sat down on the other end of the couch that Pepper was on. Rebecca took her own plate of fruit and waffles and called retreated to a chair with her phone.

“Before you ask,” Pepper started, “Tony ran off to get something, he said he’d be two minutes, its been fifteen, this sort of thing is no longer my problem and I’m leaving him to it. How are you?”

“Oh, perfectly fine,” said Peggy, “rather short of things to do, but I’m told there’s nothing for it. And you?”

“Short of things to do sounds like a good problem to have right now,” Pepper admitted, “although if I had it I’d probably be complaining about it. I never did know how to take a vacation.”

Peggy grinned, “can’t help there, I’m afraid. I’m rubbish at it. I don’t suppose I can take anything off your hands?”

“Well, I have two separate charitable foundations to move funds into, I need to liase with the mayor of New York and a few construction companies about reconstruction, and we still have about two hundred Stark Industries employees who need to be temporarily rehoused or reassigned to different SI facilities so I can avoid having to lay them off while the facilities here are rebuilt,” Pepper offered.

Peggy winced, “at the risk of sounding ungrateful, that doesn’t sound entirely inside my wheelhouse.”

Pepper laughed.

“Actually,” Rebecca cut in, “its only about one hundred and eighty employees. I managed to reshuffle the number of slots in the chemistry labs in Malibu yesterday.”

“You are my new favourite person,” said Pepper, “I thought the chemists would never stop complaining. What did you do?”

“Emotional blackmail,” said Rebecca.

“Remind you to give you a raise,” said Pepper, “in the mean time you should probably have a croissant.”

“Hey,” Tony’s voice echoed down the hall, “she can’t be your favourite, I’m your favourite.”

“You showed up,” he yelled at Peggy as he came into the room, with a sheaf of blueprints sliding out from under one arm, and then, “hey, food!”

Tony threw the blueprints he was holding haphazardly in Peggy’s general direction and went to get breakfast. Peggy and Pepper both watched the papers roll across the couch and onto the floor without attempting to pick them up.

Tony spent a full two minutes being distracted by waffles, then, vaulted over the couch to swipe up his various papers and start explaining them with his mouth full.

“So, original Stark Tower plan,” Tony said, waving it at them both, “has the penthouse, with the landing pad and the armour and all that, and then ten floors of labs. All cool, and then there’s a bunch of, I dunno, Legal and HR and general Stuff.”

He punctuated his description by waving, which sent the building design he was holding flapping through the air. Pepper rolled her eyes behind his back, because she clearly grasped that his research labs would not magically run and supply themselves, even if Tony didn’t.

“But the whole thing needs to be rebuilt now,” Tony continued, “because I just get it turned on, and then aliens come and bust it up, which is just, so typical. But if we’re rebuilding anyway I figured, why not take the opportunity to re-do the designs, because hey, who doesn’t love a remodel.”

Tony seemed even more hyperactive than the last time she’d seen him and showed no signs of approaching a point. Pepper either knew where this was going, or didn’t care, because she was typing industriously on her phone. When Peggy checked over her shoulder though, Rebecca had put her’s down to watch the show.

“So I figured, because we’re all Avengers now, that we should have some sort of headquarters or top-secret club house because that’s like, what you do, so I totally took care of it,” Tony announced, and spread his sheaf of blueprints out in front of her.

It took Peggy a few seconds to figure out what she was looking at. She could read a blueprint about as well as the next spy, but these were, improbable. So she had to stare at them for a decent while before she figured out that she was looking at five separate _floors_ of Stark Tower, converted into apartments. Sprawling, excessive apartments.

“Well its very, ambitious,” Peggy said, eventually.

“Great,” said Tony, “you can probably move in in a month, if we’re quick, maybe make that two months, all the contractors in New York are backed up for some reason, can you believe that? One little alien invasion and this whole city just falls apart.”

He grinned at her like he expected her to actually laugh at his bizarre joke.

“That’s very generous, but I’m really okay where I am,” said Peggy, levelly.

“Well that takes some pressure off,” said Tony airily, “I’ll let you know when your rooms are ready.”

“Tony I don’t want to move into your tower,” said Peggy.

Tony didn’t so much look hurt at that, as baffled, as though the idea she might _turn him down_ was so foreign to him that he simply couldn’t conceptualize it.

And Peggy just didn’t have the energy for the boring, repetitive argument they were going to have when he got it sorted out, so she took advantage of the lull.

“Thank you so much for breakfast,” she said, to Pepper, while not looking at Tony at all, “so nice to see you, have a lovely day.”

Then she stuffed the last few bites of her scone in her mouth and turned and ran.

 

She was so focused on getting out of Tony’s immediate orbit that she didn’t notice that she wasn’t watching where she was going until she walked straight into someone.

The poor woman she had just assaulted yelped at tumbled backwards Peggy grabbed for her, and ended up bent over her, holding her about two inches off the ground, and having lost any ability to enjoy romance films she retained. There was nothing dashing, exciting, or any way romantic about this position, it was just, awkward. For just a quarter of a second she could almost believe she was back, well, home, and then reality and the very awkward job the girl had done on her victory rolls, caught up with her and she realized she was looking at someone in costume.

“Sorry,” she said, pulling the girl upright and setting her back on her feet, “are you alright?”

“Don’t worry sugar, no harm done,” said the girl, who had a pronounced New York drawl, “erm, except this maybe,” she reached up and patted her hair.

“Still intact,” Peggy assured her, “but you’ve not done those quite right. Here, I can -“

“Could you? These are a nightmare, I have no idea how people used to do this,” she bent down trustingly to give Peggy access to her poorly curled hair.

Peggy gave each of the rolls a good sharp twist so they actually rolled, instead of forming unsteady loops perched on top of her head.

“There,” she said, “all fixed. They just take some practice.”

Peggy fished a compact out of her purse and handed it over so she could look.

“Wow,” she said, “that looks great! Just like the real thing. Thanks.”

“No problem,” Peggy said, nonplussedly as she ran off.

**Author's Note:**

> Electric kettles were invented in 1890 and popularized in 1922. But kettles with automatic shut-off elements (which now monopolize the market) were not invented until 1956 (by Russell Hobbs)
> 
> Wikipedia tells me travel mugs were invented in the 1980s


End file.
